Sorry guys, it’s mostly just requests for proclamations and noisy events this month. You people are letting the side down. Even the ones who wrote in about things are just the usual suspects (although no letter from Mr Regier, he must be taking a month off).

First salvo is from Ken, an indignant anti-RAGger. He’s dutifully clipped out Elaine Hnatyshyn’s recent Express column asking Council to “Tell us the real cost of Remai Art Gallery”, which, good luck with that. Also the Express missed a great opportunity to use the hed “From Riches to RAGS”, which saddens me greatly. My advice to councillors, when asked about capital cost of any project, is to reply, “Eleventy-billion dollars” with a straight face and then refuse to answer any more questions. Sure, the press may hate you but look at it this way, you’ll get the pull-quote for sure. Nobody’s going to believe whatever actual number you toss out, anyway.

May 5 to 11 is Emergency Preparedness Week; there’ll be a display on 23rd showing citizens “how the City is prepared for an unusual emergency”. No details are provided as to the nature of this emergency so feel free to speculate. It’s unusual!

Golf Fest (come on, guys, it really should be Golfest…the tagline could be “Golf, Golfer, Golfest” HIRE ME) is also asking for an exception to the no-golfing rule in order to put on a PGA Tour member demo, driving balls across the river. Golfers with an eye to opportunity will note that they’re asking for an exemption to bylaw 7767 between the hours of 10 and 3 on July 2nd. Golf is a really funny word when you type it repeatedly.

Otto from 7th St E. got a parking ticket for not moving his car in 36 hours. They even tried to tow his car. This is only the second time I’ve seen or heard of someone getting their car towed for the 36 hour rule. For god’s sake, there was a truck on *blocks* last year on Spark. Stop towing Otto and go to Forest Grove!

Neale Hall, a serial letter-writer, just wants people to be nicer to homeless people. Me too, Neale.

Les Henry has conducted a study on salt and says that, per his research, there’s not enough salt in the water melting outside the Central Avenue snow dump to justify obeying the, uh, law and building an environmentally friendly dump site. He also mentions photos of garbage at the snow dump but sadly these are not included.

Boychuk Developments wants to put up a 6 foot fence 4 feet from the property line, 2 feet closer than allowed. This is in Rosewood, so who cares. (This may seem unusually harsh but remember we declared Rosewood to be universally meh? Well, I did, and I make the rules around here.)

James Polley from Allan’s Landscaping has a point regarding snow dump fees. Since everyone benefits when snow is dumped, presumably, he proposes having a dump fee levied as part of our taxes, not a user fee.

Olivia from King Crescent wants to be added into the parking permit program as she’s worried that the new RPP extension will result in people parking in front of her house. Since the streets weren’t originally designed to handle 2 ton vehicles with encellphoned drivers, it’s making her neighbourhood unsafe. I’d say the larger problem here is the poor street design, unsafe intersections, complacent motorists, high speed limits, a culture of entitlement and a lack of accountability, but what do I know? Killing people is an indictable offense, unless you do it in a car and say they jumped out in front of you. Give her a parking pass until you fix the larger problem, I guess.

Jim Reiter, minister for something, has a thing about the mill rate ratio thing that they’re doing to control RMs’ taxation in the name of small government or something. Blah blah tax fairness. Jim Reiter has an atrocious signature, bloated and convoluted with secretive loops, defensive arcades, and a partial obliteration of his last name.

Leo is writing in about UFC. He doesn’t like it, and as a member of a credit union, doesn’t want to support it. (Credit Union Centre wants to bring it in.) Having watched UFC, I’m inclined to agree with him; it’s not much of a sport. Boxing is about as violent as I get, and I even have issues with hockey now. I’ve just seen too many people with head injuries to regard it as entertaining. I still really like Olympic hockey, though.

Sharon Elder writes in reminding the City that they’re doing a scandalous job of clearing pathways and bike lanes/streets. Full disclosure: Sharon helps run the Bike Valet service and is involved with Saskatoon Cycles. The MUP she’s talking about runs along the north side of Attridge, but it’s safe to generalize to paths everywhere. The Stew Uzelman Pedestrian Bridge is especially fun these last few weeks – whatever’s not covered in gravel and grit is decorated with dog shit and garbage. Huzzah, spring.

Phil wants the City to clean up the bus mall, specifically the windows on the bus shelters. He’s right, if you treat transit facilities as second-class, transit riders will feel second-class and will be perceived as second-class. Sometimes I wonder what would happen if the city prioritized walkway/pathway cleaning as much as they did streets. I’m sure it would eventually result in a shift of perceptions, albeit after a veritable typhoon of invective. Perhaps this is the “unusual emergency” SPS is preparing for.

Novakoski is writing in about a proposed asphalt plant on 48th St E. As an autobody and paint repair place, grit and particulate in the air places an additional burden on their ventilation systems. (Nobody wants their car to be excitingly textured when they repaint it, apparently.) They then go on to list the toxic fumes emitted from asphalt plants, which concerns me as someone working 2 blocks from one. Which raises a larger question – how is ASL permitted to continue operations when it’s within blocks of residential areas on either side? As I understand it, the city wants to make the industrial area between 33rd and 42nd into a sort of lighter, industrial-park type thing, which doesn’t bode well for ASL’s current location. I agree, let’s boot ASL out of the city to a specific environmentally hazardous park. It’ll save 39th at any rate, which should cover the costs of cleaning up the site.

Roy Rodgers (I’d make a joke here but I bet he’s reeeeallll tired of hearing it) just wants the city to fix the main break properly the first time. They’re currently on water main break #4. He’s very polite.

Edward Danneberg is a busy man. He’s busy tabulating all the bus riders on the “terrible decision” that is the #3 Riversdale bus route. Specifically, the city changed the route to jog south of Schuyler St. for a block in order to graze the tip of the Saskatoon French School, on Wellington St.

He has written no less than four times to council in the last year, three of which were about the bus route. (The fourth was about the website. He was not in favour of it either. Here are his thoughts on the website: “Saskatoon does not need a state of the art “Las Vegas” website. Why not hire a good IT pro in-house for $60K a year? You’d be able to update it very nicely over time, add anything that comes up, update it daily and give someone a job for 10 years!!!!!!!!”) If I were Councillor Lorje, I would buy a cactus, name it Edward, and stick it outside in a snowbank all winter. All good councillors practice horticultural voodoo as a coping mechanism. Also, I would hesitate to use Las Vegas as an example of state-of-the-art.

Back to the ridership tally. He calculates that the number of people getting on has “NEVER” been more than five people at once. The cost of this route, he says, cannot be overstated. He then goes on to overstate the costs. Since this route change, sections of Avenue N have had to be repaved every year. Due to the overloaded buses.

Ashley is tired of people dumping garbage behind her dad’s house on Avenue X N. The latest indignancy is a couch. She’s a former councillor from Kindersley and is ashamed that council doesn’t take these sort of things seriously. This is the big city. When people dump large pieces of unwanted household items, we don’t call the city. We set up parody accounts on Twitter. Look for @AlleyCouch coming to the #yxe feed soon.

The Intergenerational Society of Canada (yes this is a thing, apparently) would like June 1st to be declared as Intergenerational Day.

The MS Society wants May to be declared as MS Awareness Month. Knowing several people with MS, every month should be MS Month. Especially since we have a disproportionate amount of people in Saskatchewan with this disease.

Sask Innovation Week wants October 21-26th declared as Innovation Week 2013. That’s right, the organization is called Sask Innovation Week. The message, they are on it.

June 12 is most likely going to be Filipino-Canadian Day, as I doubt Council will reject it.

June 2013 is Recreation and Parks Month. I am getting awfully tired of listing these requests. Fortunately there is only one more thing and it’s June 16th to 22nd as the 15th Annual Native Prairie Appreciation Week, which could mean any number of things but in this context it’s about ecosystems.

Oof, that’s it. Have fun tomorrow, kiddos. I am now taking bets on the most contentious issue.